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Letters to the Editor

"Minority" History

Julie Leininger Pycior, January 1998

To the Editor:

Kudos for featuring Patricia Nelson Limerick's "Has 'Minority' History Transformed the Historical Discourse?" in the November Perspectives. Indeed, too often, as she writes, "with our attentiveness to cultural self-determination, we obscure and evade the facts of power," and we need "a better and deeper understanding of the elite, the powerful," leading to a "picture of the reciprocal, mutually influencing, interactive relationships" between the two.

It was just such concerns that led me to write LBJ and Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power (Univ. of Texas Press). Limerick notes that "we might profit from the example of David Montejano's Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas." Similarly, I write in the introduction to my book, "David Montejano is a prime model of the younger historian described by Michael Kazin as 'increasingly exploring the more political aspects of history "from the bottom up."'"